The new expert council met for its first constituent meeting today. It is the successor body to the Corona Expert Council, which met for the last time in April 2023. On a scientific basis, the 23 members will address the question of how the healthcare system and society can best counter future health crises. The expert council is able to provide "ad hoc" guidance to the federal government on current public health issues.
The council is comprised of researchers from various disciplines, including public health, epidemiology, ethics, medicine, modeling, nursing science, psychology, social sciences, virology, computer science, statistics, and data processing and modeling. The members work on a voluntary and independent basis. The chairperson is Professor Heyo Kroemer, Chairman of the Board of Charité. Co-chairperson is Professor Susanne Moebus from the University Medical Center Essen. "We need a broad-based council of experts to be able to respond to future health crises in the best possible way. One teaching from the pandemic is that we need to make our healthcare system more resilient and robust, also in terms of the consequences of climate change and demographic developments. I would like to thank all members for their willingness to contribute to this future-oriented task," said Federal Chancellor Olaf Scholz.
About Iris Pigeot and Tanja Schultz
Professor Iris Pigeot has been director of what is now the Leibniz Institute for Prevention Research and Epidemiology – BIPS since March 2004 and has headed the Biometry and IT Department there since 2001. After various research and teaching positions, including at ETH Zurich (Switzerland) and LMU Munich, she accepted a professorship in "Statistics with a Focus on Biometry and Methods of Epidemiology" at the University of Bremen in September 2001. Her research interests include digital public health, statistical methods and data protection issues in connection with data sharing, distributed data analysis, record linkage, and the development of research data infrastructures. She was awarded the "Susanne Dahms Medal for Special Merit in Biometrics" by the German Region of the International Biometric Society (IBS-DR) in 2010 and has been president of the International Biometric Society since January 2024.
Tanja Schultz was appointed Professor of Cognitive Systems at the University of Bremen in April 2015. Prior to this, she was a professor at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology from 2007 to 2015, a research scientist from 2000 to 2006, and an adjunct professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, PA in the USA from 2007. She researches and develops cognitive technical systems that adapt to the needs of their users by interpreting biosignals. To this end, she combines machine learning methods and signal processing with innovations in biosensor technology. She received the Alcatel-Lucent Research Award for Technical Communication in 2012 for her overall work and has been named a fellow of the ISCA (2016), EASA (2017), IEEE (2020), and AAIA (2021) for her academic contributions. She is the spokesperson of the Minds, Media, Machines high-profile area at the University of Bremen, a member of the board of directors of the Leibniz Science Campus Digital Public Health, and spokesperson of the Lifespan AI DFG Research Unit
Contact:
Prof. Dr. Iris Pigeot
Leibniz Institute for Prevention Research and Epidemiology – BIPS
Phone: +49 421 218-56942
Email: pigeotleibniz-bips.de
Prof. Dr.-Ing. Tanja Schultz
Faculty of Mathematics / Computer Science
University of Bremen
Phone: +49 421 218-64270
Email: tanja.schultzuni-bremen.de
© Matej Meza (links) / Jens Lehmkühler (rechts) / Universität Bremen
Federal Chancellery advisors: Professors Iris Pigeot (left) and Tanja Schultz from the University of Bremen have been appointed to the Expert Council on Health and Resilience.
